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Scent of a Movie

Last week, the four-and-a-half-minute "Thunder Perfect Mind" made its debut at the Berlin Film Festival. Directed by Ridley Scott, "Thunder Perfect Mind" is part of a burgeoning genre of cinema -- the superlong commercial as short film, in this case created for the introduction of the new Prada fragrance.

Maybe you have already seen Dolce & Gabbana's melodramatic fragrance ad for Sicily featuring Monica Bellucci, or the TV spots of Baz Luhrmann's mini-epic for Chanel No. 5 starring Nicole Kidman as an actress whose similarity to the actress Nicole Kidman plays in "Moulin Rouge" is just too weird. The Prada film, which strives to be simultaneously more and less commercial, casts the model Daria Werbowy as a beautifully accessorized bundle of contradictions. As she makes her way through the streets of Berlin, she sees herself coming and going at every turn in the faces of other women, some older, some quite a bit younger, some more wholesome and some actually Werbowy herself. In a particularly delicious moment, shot in the back of a taxi, an unseen driver ogles her in the rearview mirror, watching as she removes her winter coat only to put it back on inside out. "I was told, basically, to sit down and drink a cup of tea," says Scott, who collaborated -- or contended -- with both his daughter, Jordan, a promising director in her own right, and Miuccia Prada. "This project is a testament to women in all forms."

There is no dialogue, just a poem read in a voice-over and set to a smooth, jazzy soundtrack. "The poem was too perfect," says Jordan, who happened upon it nearly a decade ago and was saving it for the right project. A Gnostic text probably written around the first century, it prescribes a wisdom that cuts eerily to the quick on more than one level: I am shame and boldness. . . . I am the substance and the one who has no substance. ALIX BROWNE